Environmental Futures

Wiley-Blackwell, 2016

While prognoses about the future are as old as human society, this edited book argues that the proliferation of new ways of modeling, planning, and interpolating the future of resources and environments is an increasing feature of contemporary environmental politics. In the introduction, which I coauthored with Andrew S. Mathews, we draw out two dimensions to this prognostic politics: first, the processes of making predictions about the future; and second, the movement of these predictions through the unstable and messy institutions that act upon the future in the present. We argue that new regimes of environmental forecasting and contests over these prognoses are giving rise to new forms of nature, framings of time and space, and modes of politics. Environmental Futures brings together a set of ten papers, which were originally published as the 2016 Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.